Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of speech recognition. Speech recognition systems have been deployed for many years on various types of devices including desktop and laptop computer systems as well as telephone systems, such as cellular telephones and/or smartphones which include cellular telephones. One use of speech recognition systems in telephones, such as smart phones, is the use of name dialing which allows a user to speak a name in a contacts database in order to cause the telephone to initiate a telephone call. Speech recognition systems can use phonetic dictionaries or lexicons in order to recognize spoken words. Some speech recognition systems, particularly those which are adapted to provide natural language recognition, use a large phonetic dictionary to model a large set of words. These systems can be used to recognize names in an address book or contacts database, but these systems often have difficulty with names due to the fact that the names are often not modeled in a phonetic dictionary or the names are in a different locale from the locale used in the phonetic dictionary.